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The primary focus of my linguistic research has always been the language of everyday conversation. As I gained more insight into typically male and female ways of using language, I began to suspect why women who go to single-sex schools do better in later life and why males talk more when young women sit next to young men in classrooms. This is not to say that all men talk in class or that no women do. It is simply that a greater percentage of discussion time is taken by men's voices.
The research of sociologists and anthropologists demonstrates that girls and boys learn to use language differently in their sex-separate peer groups. Typically, a girl has a best friend with whom she sits and talks, frequently telling secrets. It's the telling of secrets, the fact and the way that they talk to each other, that makes them best friends. For boys, activities are central: Their best friends are the ones they do things with. Boys also tend to play in larger groups that are hierarchical. High-status boys give orders and push low-status boys around. So boys are expected to use language to seize center stage: by exhibiting their skill, displaying their knowledge, and challenging and resisting challenges.
This has stunning implications for classroom interaction. Most faculty assume that participating in class discussion is necessary for successful performance. Yet, speaking in a classroom is more congenial to boys' language experience than to girls', since it entails putting oneself forward in front of a large group of people, many of whom are strangers and at least one of whom is sure to judge the speakers' knowledge and intelligence by their verbal display.
Also making many classrooms more hospitable to most men than to most women is use of debate-like formats as a learning tool. As Walter Ong has shown, our educational system is fundamentally male in that the pursuit of knowledge is believed to be achieved by ritual opposition--public display followed by argument and challenge--which is fundamental to the way most males approach almost any activity (e.g., the little boy who shows he likes a little girl by pulling her braids and shoving her). But ritual opposition is antithetical to the way most females learn and like...